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I’m currently watching ‘The Bodyguard’ for the first time. Always late to the party, that’s me. I grew up in a fairly strict household, no M rated movies and all that. I remember that this movie and ‘Dirty Dancing’ were the movies that everyone (ie, my closest girlfriends) had seen and absolutely loved. Most of time the restrictions I grew up with didn’t bother me, but not participanting in this piece of pop culture chaffed a bit. (How good I was as a teen, not even sneaking off and watching in my own time). Watching the movie now, I’ve remembered that I owed a pirated (taped) copy of the soundtrack. ‘I have nothing’ was my fav track, I’d completely forgotten until I saw it just now in the movie.

God bless the Grauniad!
Poor old Whitney seems to make the grade as to an unhealthy trait in pop stars ever since Judy Garland, the working class woman who cracks the big time, falls under the influence of a Svengali and ends up addicted to booze, pills or recreational drugs.
Was Tina Turner tougher? She survived by getting shot of her husband sooner rather than too late.
I knew the brilliant Dionne Warwick was a cousin, but how about Aretha Franklin as a godmother?
Maybe she’s going to be compared with Amy Winehouse. Winehouse was another who gambled once too often and lost, it seems to me.

What gets me though Paul is that there’s at least as many men in the music industry involved with drug addiction etc, and they’re noted, but they aren’t held up as some sort of moral message about failed manhood.
When Keith Richards or Ozzy Osbourne drop off the twig, are they going to be presented as victims of their addictions do you think? Will it be in the headlines and the first paragraph and be a repeating lede? Or will it be something that they get to somewhere in the middle of all the articles and then move on from? I’m betting it will be the second.

That’s an interesting point.
Blokes are thought of as too “boofy”, you’d expect no better and if someonelike Jim Morrison drinks himself to death, well, one less superfluous male.
But in the genre of pop culture, the melodramatic downfall of a tragic rose is fare for much deeper self indulgence- the whole thing can last for days and keep journalists on the job ever so much more lucratively.
Male of female, it remains interesting to people, because they want to know why a star is dead, despite all the smarts and having made a motzah, when idiots like us somehow had the nous to survive life’s vissicitudes, despite some times also indulging in self harming behaviours which we survived, because of our proletarian down-to-earthness.

Summarising, it comes down to the commonality of death amongst stars, which also reminds people of the unfortunate friend(s) of their youth who ended up dying of cirrhosis or playing armchair darts with their own own veins, or maybe in a car prang.
Personally, I wonder that I escaped some of the antics I set myself up for.
So the appeal of stories like these comes with the realisation of ones own narrow escapes- the difference must have come down to a nano and you have an unpleasant idea this came down more to good luck than good management.
But it does give you that brief affinity with the entertainment godz.
You could be chatting chatting with Keefy or one of the other legend geezers and you can say, “well, at least when I was off my tree, I didn;t actually fallout of it”.